Version 1 of the aldweb Site - February 11th, 1999 / December 31st, 2002

The aldweb was put online on the internet February 11th, 1999.

It was initially made of 4 HTML pages, or 8 to be precise when taking into account the English mirror of the French version, written with my Ma Page Web freeware. It included the home page, the My Hobbies page, the presentation of my two first freeware programs Ma Page Web and Gestion de Projet.

It will evolve this way, being enriched by a a new PC freeware (Mémo Friends), some articles about my hobby for pocket computers of the 80's, my first Palm freeware and Palm shareware.

At the end of 2002, almost 4 years later, it will also run my first home made PHP/Javascript scripts (a dynamic menu, a visits' counter, a guestbook and a forum).

This screenshot shows the home page (French version) as it could be seen end of December 2002


And the same page in English


My first guestbook script made in PHP with its data stored in plain text files


And my first forum system, to offer a sharing space for the pocket computers hobbyists (which was a live community at the time), also developped in PHP and storing its data in generated HTML pages

Version 2 of the aldweb Site - January 1st, 2003 / November 30th, 2009

The version 2 story started in June 2002 when I was bored to maintain the static HTML pages which had become too many over time. So, I started looking for a dynamic web portal system.

Fall 2002, I came to the conclusion that none of the open source systems from that time would cover my needs, being a simple portal, natively bilingual, without a sophisticated database system.

Therefore, and because I like the sentence which says (in French) that nobody is better helped but by himself, and also because I was curious to learn the new trends and what dynamic web programming was, I decided to code a little portal system for myself and for the purpose of my web site needs, which I named miniPortail (tinyPortal in English), and I put the new version of my site online January 1st, 2003.

I then told myself that maybe some of my visitors could be interested by this system and I decided to offer the script files for free and open-sourced them. Without knowing it, I had just launched the GuppY project, and I was for long to spend much more time in developping this tool than any of the other areas of interest which I initially developped my site for, and this was just the opposite to the main objective for easing my work with such a portal system!

Indeed, right after it was put online, miniPortail met an incredible success, which I was really not expecting at all, and pionners joined me as they found what they were looking for in this web portal system: something very easy to get hands on and to use, a robust reliability thanks to its centralized engine of the different components a portal system is made of.

The story keeps going on very fast, new versions are put online very quickly as new good evolution ideas arrive all the time, and a second developper quickly joins me. The GuppY Team is created, a wonderful user manual is also written, helping even more first time users to use the tool. Soon, miniPortail is not a tiny system anymore, it is therefore relabelled to its current name being GuppY in September 2003 and it leaves my personal web site to its www.freeguppy.org dedicated web site.

I carried the project with a lot of fun, but also with too much dedication given my available free time, until fall 2004. Two years after having started almost in spite of my own desire this project, I decided to give it a break.

My own personal web site was then to remain frozen on the latest version 3.0 of GuppY which was the last version I had leaded, I was to go back during 5 years to my Palm programming hobby and my Palm software were a great success too.

Here is a screenshot of the site as it was end of November 2009


And here is the very small posthumous page which remained on my site of the miniPortail / GuppY incredible story

Version 3 of the aldweb Site - since December 1st, 2009

During the last 4 years, the new talented developpers who took over the GuppY project kept enhancing this web portal system. The GuppY Team, on its side, animated the project in a wonderful way, up to creating a dedicated non-profit organization.

My site was 10 years old on February 11th, 2009 without nobody noticing it, and it had to wait for me until end of November 2009 before I took the time to finally upgrade it to the latest GuppY version 4.6.

And there it is, beginning of December 2009, thanks to the help of Papinou from the so talented GuppY skinners' team